TJ Guy expected to be busy this March and into the spring as he ramped up his college football recruitment.
The highly-touted 6-foot-4, 240-pound junior defensive end from Mansfield was eager to make his first visits to colleges across the country that were salivating over his potential after he de-committed from Boston College in February.
Guy had trips to Michigan, Nebraska and Kentucky in the works, among other schools. But Guy’s once-filled scheduled was left bare when the NCAA issued a mandatory recruitment dead period on March 13 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in no on-campus or off-campus in-person contact for coaches with recruits.
Along with other top junior prospects throughout the country, Guy’s recruitment is in a holding pattern as he is unable to take the next step in the process of deciding where he will play college football.
“It was going to have a big impact on where I was going to go and help me decide because I was going to see all the schools,” said Guy, who has stayed in contact with coaches over the phone during this dead period that will last through at least April 15. “I was kind of shaken up about it.”
Stepping foot on campuses and trying to picture the future once there is a major part of the equation for recruits. St. Sebastian’s Louis Hansen, who is ranked as the eighth-best tight end nationally for his class by 24/7Sports and recently postponed a half-a-dozen trips to major collegiate programs like Notre Dame and Wisconsin, has had the opportunity to visit schools before and knows it can make a vital difference.
“It’s almost everything,” Hansen said. “You see what you see on TV, but then you got to go check it out because that’s the school I’m going to be attending for the next three or four years. It’s important to see what the students are like, what the classes are like and obviously what the football facilities are like. It’s really important to get those visits in before making a decision.”
Most high-end recruits, like Hansen and Casey Phinney, a linebacker for Noble and Greenough, want to reveal their big-time decision during the summer, but without these visits, that timeline could be significantly altered.
“I was pretty disappointed. I was real excited to go to Michigan,” Phinney said. “I had a couple of other visits I was about to plan. I was hoping to get my recruitment wrapped up by the summertime and now that looks like it will get pushed farther back now.”
That’s where some recruits could be put into a bind. Longtime Mansfield coach Mike Redding, who went through a much different recruitment than the one experienced by players today – he committed to Holy Cross after his senior season and starred for the Crusaders from 1979-82 – feels that the affected timetables could lead recruits into rushed decisions brought upon by their suitors.
“A lot of those places force you to make a decision and tell you basically the (scholarship) offer is good through August,” Redding said. “Some schools might extend the offer, some schools might not. It’s going to get complicated, for sure.”
Defensive tackle Terry Lockett, who helped Springfield Central to a second consecutive Div. 3 state title this fall, felt frustrated over cancelling four planned trips, but didn’t wait around as he announced his verbal commitment to Syracuse on Sunday via Twitter.
“I feel like everything happens for a reason, so I’ll end up where I need to be at the end of this,” Lockett said.
The postponement of visits has made the process even more intricate for Belmont Hill defensive tackle Ikenna Ugbaja. Ugbaja expected to visit Vanderbilt, currently his top choice, but couldn’t amid coronavirus concerns and his options might be limited if he isn’t able to make trips to other colleges.
“There’s a lot of schools that have said, like Wake Forest and Tennessee and Stanford, ‘You’re an offer guy if you visit the campus,’” Ugbaja said. “Stanford being my dream school for my whole life, me visiting the school and them potentially offering would have been huge.”
Most of the recruits aren’t concerned that visits being put on hold will affect where they ultimately end up, but the difficult circumstances have undoubtedly thrown the recruitment of these top juniors and others off-course.
“There’s that trickle-down effect,” Redding said. “The longer the Division 1 guys take to make a decision, (the longer) those other guys don’t know where they fall in in the ladder of the recruiting. It’s definitely going to impact everyone.”
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March 29, 2020 at 05:01PM
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Top football recruits wait it out - Boston Herald
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